Jan. 09, 2015

Bill Nye on the Origins of Evolution

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. If you just joined us, I'd like to introduce a guest you've known for a while. It's Bill Nye the science guy-- is here, and he's going to talk about his new book, Undeniable- Evolution and the Science of Creation. And he's here to talk about it because there's been some interesting results of a Gallup study from May 2014 talks about 42% of Americans believe that god created humans just as they are today. No theory of evolution is needed.

And the percentage of folks in the US who think we evolved without God playing any role in the process is just 19%. I know that Bill thinks this is a big problem-- so much so that he wrote his whole book about evolution, Undeniable. He's no stranger to the program. He joins us talk about it and why evolution is so key to science education. You can actually reader an excerpt from Bill's book at our website. It's sciencefriday.com/undeniable. Friday Good to have you back, Bill.

BILL NYE: It's so good to be back. Happy New Year.

IRA FLATOW: Happy New Year. You say in your book that you take the denial of evolution personally. Personally.

BILL NYE: Yeah, I mean, as a science educator, I failed. That's all. My life has been a waste. It's no big deal. No, I think it's very important for everybody to understand the fundamentals of evolution. It's the main idea in all of life science, Ira. So we want as many people in the world's most technologically advanced society to be aware of it for crying out loud.

IRA FLATOW: Now is it true that, after your debate about creation-- that famous debate that you said--

BILL NYE: Creationism.

IRA FLATOW: Creationism, thank you-- that you sat down and decided, hey, I need to write this book.

BILL NYE: Well, my editor did.

IRA FLATOW: That's a nice co-author you have on the book.

BILL NYE: Oh, Corey Powell.

IRA FLATOW: Corey Powell.

BILL NYE: Well, it was actually-- so the editor is actually Jennifer Weis at Saint Martin's Press, if I may toot the horn there. And Corey Powell, who's been on the show, I guess, many times--

IRA FLATOW: Right.

BILL NYE: --helped out. So I would call Corey every morning-- well, let's call it almost every morning-- and he would tell me what to do next. And the key to what really-- for me, Ira-- getting it done quickly is to make-- to divide it into small tasks. You've written books, right?

IRA FLATOW: Yes. Yes.

BILL NYE: You divide the tasks up enough, then you can get them done.

IRA FLATOW: And so what's the message, the overall message of this book?

BILL NYE: Evolution is how we all got here. It's worth understanding, and we are part of this larger process. I guess that's the main-est of the main ideas-- is we are part of this enormous picture. And that is at once humbling and makes you feel insignificant and of no worth in the scheme of things, or it's empowering, because you can understand this process that brings us all together and shows that we are all more alike than we are different and we should have reverence for living things, and so on.

IRA FLATOW: Can you believe in God and believe in evolution at the same time?

BILL NYE: I guess, yes, because evolution is provable. Whether or not God exists is a little more difficult to prove. So if you have a scheme, a worldview that doesn't include evolution, I will show, I think, logically that it's incomplete.

IRA FLATOW: What about other famous scientists like Francis Collins, who--

BILL NYE: Who, yeah, believe-- that's great bring it on.

IRA FLATOW: They're devout Christians.

BILL NYE: I met him, hung out with him at the-- you know, at the White House, because--

IRA FLATOW: You're that kind of guy.

BILL NYE: That's how we roll, yeah. So that was fine. Here's my claim, or my assertion-- whatever you believe, whatever your world view, the earth is not 6,000 years old or 10,000 years old, which is the creationist point of view, and that's clear. Obvious-- I mean to us, on my side, it's obviously wrong. And so you don't want to raise a generation of kids who don't understand this big idea.

IRA FLATOW: Can you become too strident in your criticism of religion? I mean, there are--

BILL NYE: Oh, I'm not criticizing religion.

IRA FLATOW: I'm not saying--

BILL NYE: Who's criticizing religion?

IRA FLATOW: I'm not talking about you. You haven't answered my-- I have to finish asking the question. There are others scientists who are very strident in criticizing people who believe in some kind of god or religion, and--

BILL NYE: You're talking about Richard Dawkins, for example.

IRA FLATOW: Well, OK, if you bring that name up.

BILL NYE: Well, you're going down this path. This is fun, you guys.

IRA FLATOW: Is that not counterproductive to do that?

BILL NYE: We need all the voices. It's a spectrum. So you wouldn't have people like me in the middle without people like Dr. Dawkins to one side. And where Ken Ham fits in and creationism, I leave that up to your listeners, but his worldview-- or what he seems to believe-- is demonstrably wrong, and so I just assumed it didn't really go on the same chart.

IRA FLATOW: Now, I had somebody who sent me a note about, when you debate with creationists about the age of the Earth and that sort of thing, he said, you know, a lot of people who live in Texas and have Texas school books talking about--

BILL NYE: For example.

IRA FLATOW: For example. And he said, why don't you invite an oil man, oil person, to school and have the oil man answer where does the oil come from?

BILL NYE: They're in the Permian Basin.

IRA FLATOW: And how did it get there? How long ago was that?

BILL NYE: Well, Ira, these are all-- this is-- if I may, everybody, I see your point of view, but it's very difficult to change an adult creationist's mind. That's that person-- a guy like Mr. Ham has gone a long way down the road. He makes his living with this world view.

The people that I'm concerned about are people in, let's say, middle school-- people who are open minded or still haven't established themselves intellectually. By that, I mean their reasoning is not fully developed this way or that way. Those are the people that we really had to reach.

So when I did that debate in Kentucky, my audience, from at least my way of thinking, was not really there in the auditorium. It was online. The thing has had millions of views, for crying out loud. And can I go on some more about me and tooting my horn? Doo da da da! My book, which I just sat down and kind of hammered out, is a New York Times bestseller. What I mean is, it just shows you how interested people are in this, here, in the most advanced society-- you can say maybe Japan, or New Zealand, or something-- but in one of the world's most advanced societies, we have people that don't believe in the main idea in biology. It's wild.

IRA FLATOW: But you're an engineer attacking-- writing a book about evolution.

BILL NYE: Well here's what I say about me as an engineer. I took a lot of physics, everybody, and what I describe in this book is a primer on evolution. It's not that I'm a world class evolutionary biologist. These are fundamental ideas that everybody should-- in my view, the world would be better if everybody understood.

IRA FLATOW: You also take a view in your book on genetically engineered food.

BILL NYE: Oh, it's been "con-tra-versal." Yes.

IRA FLATOW: Tell us about that, the "con-tra-versy."

BILL NYE: The "con-tra-versy" has been I assert that, although we can know whatever we do to an organism-- wheat, soybeans, potatoes, especially corn-- you can know with extraordinary precision and confidence the genome, or the sequence of genes, for that organism with extraordinary accuracy. What you can't know is when you take organisms that have speciated-- different species that have come to be over geologic time scales, hundreds of millions of year-- and you mix those-- not really mix those genes, but insert genes from one into the other, you can't know what you're going to do to the ecosystem, to the other organisms that live with those new, novel, genetically modified organisms.

Now, so these things are tested over three or four growing seasons by a manufacturer-- let's say, Monsanto. Let's say Monsanto-- Then they're tested again by the Department of Agriculture. And you can show with great confidence that these foods are safe to eat. I mean, bring it on. Bring on the popcorn. I'm loving it.

But what you can't be sure of is, if you've messed with some insect that is now killed by the corn that has this bacillus-- that has this bacterium's genes put in it, and then that turns out that that insect carries a virus, which kills a parasite, which attacks this other thing, which then affects-- and then, buh, buh, buh. You can't really be sure, especially if you're doing it for only a decade. These things came into existence over hundreds of millions-- so I'm open minded.

And the other thing, which is separate-- I hardly address in the book at all-- is are we-- the claim is that we're going to need enormous amounts of food to feed billions of people in the future, but we waste a lot of food. We throw away a lot of food. So it's not clear that production is the problem you need to solve. So just being able to produce enormous amounts of food-- it's not clear that's really where we should be throwing our tax dollars. So these are controversial, and what I plan to do--

IRA FLATOW: Well, I think-- yes go ahead.

BILL NYE: What I plan to do is go to Omaha, Nebraska and meet with Bill Fraley, who's the chief technology officer at Monsanto. And he's going to give me earful, and if I'm wrong, I will write about it.

IRA FLATOW: But they also make pesticides, right? They make herbicides. And is it better to have all those herbicides?

BILL NYE: It's on and on and on. And these are the great questions. And so bear in mind that intra-species modification-- that is to say, modifying wheat with wheat. People have been doing since there have been people. Bring it on. George Washington was apparently really-- he was a hobbyist. That you can see. I think you can argue you're not going to do anything that's going to mess with an ecosystem in any spectacular way, because they're so close in geologic time.

The problem is when you start getting these things that are a long way apart. They speciated a long time ago-- or the potential problem. So I plan to meet with a guy and hear exactly what he has to say. And if he changes my mind, I will have my mind changed.

IRA FLATOW: All right, well you'll come back and tell us about it.

BILL NYE: A man can dream. A man can dream, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Speaking of dreaming, Ian from Honolulu is on the phone. Hi, welcome to Science Friday.

IAN: Hey, thanks a lot. This is pretty exciting. So I actually-- by way of background, I got to see the debate between Dr. Nye and Ken Ham, and I thought it was a good debate. The way I'm coming at the-- it touches on exactly what you guys were just talking about, which is kind of like the field of bioethics. And where I'm coming at is that I think that the whole debate between religion and science-- can you prove one. Can you prove God doesn't exist? And can people of faith believe in evolution is so passe.

I think what's really critical, given the fact that you guys have emphasized many times about how we live in such a technologically advanced society with tools that we don't even know what we might end up doing with them is that we sort of get beyond that and really find ways for the debate or the discussion to be less about a debate over science versus religion and more about how we apply all of the expanding knowledge that we have to really difficult problems that have a real moral, ethical component, where people of faith and people of faith who happen to also be scientists and participate in the discovery of it can weigh in.

And I'm wondering-- I guess my question is, Dr. Nye believe that there's a way that maybe he and where he's coming from and the folks that he interacts with can do more to sort of direct to the discussion towards that, instead of-- it seems to always end up falling back to the same old debate, and I actually kind of see this fault for that laying on both extreme creationists, both sides--

IRA FLATOW: We'll get--

IAN: --and extreme--

IRA FLATOW: Let me get-- I've got only a limited amount of time to get their answer. I'm talking with Bill Nye, author of Undeniable-- Evolution and the Science of Creation on Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. Mr. Nye. Do you have an answer to that question? How you can all get together and concentrate on the big issues that need to be solved?

BILL NYE: Well, the biggest issue we need to solve-- changing the subject-- is climate change. And there is something consistent about denying evolution and denying climate change. This is a big thing with, for example, Answers in Genesis, where I was doing this debate. As far as it being scientists' fault for being equally at fault for not engaging people in moving us all forward, you're asking a lot.

To have people that depend on our understanding of geology-- you brought up earlier oil fields. I used to work in the oil patch down there in the Permian Basin. You ever been to Snyder? Big Spring?

IRA FLATOW: Been to Flatonia.

BILL NYE: Wow. Anyway, you know what I'm saying? It's a lot to ask of scientists to give credence, or time, or especially this expression, equal time, to these extraordinary world views, which are inconsistent with everything we observe in nature. With that said, I really do, sir-- I do really do do my best to be civil, to respect people as best as I can. And I'm delighted that you watched the debate. That just shows you-- just doing the debate raised the issue that we're talking about it, so that maybe is good.

IRA FLATOW: So maybe you need another debate, any other debate? You had enough of one? Maybe a debate with Monsanto? I don't--

BILL NYE: Well, I mean, maybe the guy will change my mind. I say you can understand the organism, but not the ecosystem, so let us be careful. That's my premise.

IRA FLATOW: Have you got another book in the works?

BILL NYE: Yeah, the next one is about climate change.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah?

BILL NYE: I was just working on it today. And so my thing is all of us-- it's very common to find books on the shelves now, and people on your show, and people on MSNBC, and CNN, and Fox-- where I'd love to be in the den there-- who are on either side of this thing and are wringing their hands about we're all going to die. The world is in horrible shape. And there's something to that.

But I want to present-- is an optimistic view. The things that we can do together to-- dare I say it-- change the world-- now, in my view, we need to do everything all at once. And for those of you who hate government-- or, sorry, are very disturbed by the size of government, do not want government involved, I'll just point out that, if we keep down this road of not doing anything about climate change, of not talking about climate change, we're going to end up with a lot of regulations. There's going to be a backlash. People are going to jump all over this--

IRA FLATOW: But what about the new Congress with this? Now headed by Republicans who are not the leaders in climate change?

BILL NYE: Well, you've got to take the longer view. And we have people-- the guy from South Dakota-- who acknowledges that climate change is a serious problem, and he's a very conservative guy. We have more in common than we have differences. So I want us to move forward. And I believe it's going to take technical solutions.

If you can invent the better battery, better electrical energy storage system-- if you can invent the way to desalinate seawater economically, you will get rich.

[COMICAL MANIACAL LAUGH]

IRA FLATOW: Well, solar energy.

BILL NYE: Solar energy is plentiful. If you can come up with more efficient solar panels, that would be great. But then the other thing I think we're going to need is top down reinvestment by taxing-- sorry, not taxing. Sorry, my bad. Excuse me. I meant having a fee associated with carbon dioxide. And we have a model for this in the state of Alaska, a top down scheme of distributing wealth. We can do it everybody. We can do it.

IRA FLATOW: Bill Nye, author of Undeniable-- Evolution and the Science of Creation. You can also read an excerpt from Bill's book at our website at sciencefriday.com/undeniable. Always a pleasure to have you on, Bill.

BILL NYE: Thanks for having me. Let's change the world, everybody.

IRA FLATOW: There you go.

CLOSE

In February 2014, Bill Nye traveled to Kentucky to debate evolution with Ken Ham, a prominent creationist. Following the event, he set out to continue the conversation in what’s become his new book, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation. Drawing on the wonderment that spurred his own interest in science as a child, Nye approaches evolution as the bedrock to scientific knowledge and education. He also shares his concern that failure to accept evolution will prevent the U.S. from keeping pace with the technological advancements of other countries. Read an excerpt from Nye's book here.

Produced by Becky Fogel, Production Assistant

Guests

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. If you just joined us, I'd like to introduce a guest you've known for a while. It's Bill Nye the science guy-- is here, and he's going to talk about his new book, Undeniable- Evolution and the Science of Creation. And he's here to talk about it because there's been some interesting results of a Gallup study from May 2014 talks about 42% of Americans believe that god created humans just as they are today. No theory of evolution is needed.

And the percentage of folks in the US who think we evolved without God playing any role in the process is just 19%. I know that Bill thinks this is a big problem-- so much so that he wrote his whole book about evolution, Undeniable. He's no stranger to the program. He joins us talk about it and why evolution is so key to science education. You can actually reader an excerpt from Bill's book at our website. It's sciencefriday.com/undeniable. Friday Good to have you back, Bill.

BILL NYE: It's so good to be back. Happy New Year.

IRA FLATOW: Happy New Year. You say in your book that you take the denial of evolution personally. Personally.

BILL NYE: Yeah, I mean, as a science educator, I failed. That's all. My life has been a waste. It's no big deal. No, I think it's very important for everybody to understand the fundamentals of evolution. It's the main idea in all of life science, Ira. So we want as many people in the world's most technologically advanced society to be aware of it for crying out loud.

IRA FLATOW: Now is it true that, after your debate about creation-- that famous debate that you said--

BILL NYE: Creationism.

IRA FLATOW: Creationism, thank you-- that you sat down and decided, hey, I need to write this book.

BILL NYE: Well, my editor did.

IRA FLATOW: That's a nice co-author you have on the book.

BILL NYE: Oh, Corey Powell.

IRA FLATOW: Corey Powell.

BILL NYE: Well, it was actually-- so the editor is actually Jennifer Weis at Saint Martin's Press, if I may toot the horn there. And Corey Powell, who's been on the show, I guess, many times--

IRA FLATOW: Right.

BILL NYE: --helped out. So I would call Corey every morning-- well, let's call it almost every morning-- and he would tell me what to do next. And the key to what really-- for me, Ira-- getting it done quickly is to make-- to divide it into small tasks. You've written books, right?

IRA FLATOW: Yes. Yes.

BILL NYE: You divide the tasks up enough, then you can get them done.

IRA FLATOW: And so what's the message, the overall message of this book?

BILL NYE: Evolution is how we all got here. It's worth understanding, and we are part of this larger process. I guess that's the main-est of the main ideas-- is we are part of this enormous picture. And that is at once humbling and makes you feel insignificant and of no worth in the scheme of things, or it's empowering, because you can understand this process that brings us all together and shows that we are all more alike than we are different and we should have reverence for living things, and so on.

IRA FLATOW: Can you believe in God and believe in evolution at the same time?

BILL NYE: I guess, yes, because evolution is provable. Whether or not God exists is a little more difficult to prove. So if you have a scheme, a worldview that doesn't include evolution, I will show, I think, logically that it's incomplete.

IRA FLATOW: What about other famous scientists like Francis Collins, who--

BILL NYE: Who, yeah, believe-- that's great bring it on.

IRA FLATOW: They're devout Christians.

BILL NYE: I met him, hung out with him at the-- you know, at the White House, because--

IRA FLATOW: You're that kind of guy.

BILL NYE: That's how we roll, yeah. So that was fine. Here's my claim, or my assertion-- whatever you believe, whatever your world view, the earth is not 6,000 years old or 10,000 years old, which is the creationist point of view, and that's clear. Obvious-- I mean to us, on my side, it's obviously wrong. And so you don't want to raise a generation of kids who don't understand this big idea.

IRA FLATOW: Can you become too strident in your criticism of religion? I mean, there are--

BILL NYE: Oh, I'm not criticizing religion.

IRA FLATOW: I'm not saying--

BILL NYE: Who's criticizing religion?

IRA FLATOW: I'm not talking about you. You haven't answered my-- I have to finish asking the question. There are others scientists who are very strident in criticizing people who believe in some kind of god or religion, and--

BILL NYE: You're talking about Richard Dawkins, for example.

IRA FLATOW: Well, OK, if you bring that name up.

BILL NYE: Well, you're going down this path. This is fun, you guys.

IRA FLATOW: Is that not counterproductive to do that?

BILL NYE: We need all the voices. It's a spectrum. So you wouldn't have people like me in the middle without people like Dr. Dawkins to one side. And where Ken Ham fits in and creationism, I leave that up to your listeners, but his worldview-- or what he seems to believe-- is demonstrably wrong, and so I just assumed it didn't really go on the same chart.

IRA FLATOW: Now, I had somebody who sent me a note about, when you debate with creationists about the age of the Earth and that sort of thing, he said, you know, a lot of people who live in Texas and have Texas school books talking about--

BILL NYE: For example.

IRA FLATOW: For example. And he said, why don't you invite an oil man, oil person, to school and have the oil man answer where does the oil come from?

BILL NYE: They're in the Permian Basin.

IRA FLATOW: And how did it get there? How long ago was that?

BILL NYE: Well, Ira, these are all-- this is-- if I may, everybody, I see your point of view, but it's very difficult to change an adult creationist's mind. That's that person-- a guy like Mr. Ham has gone a long way down the road. He makes his living with this world view.

The people that I'm concerned about are people in, let's say, middle school-- people who are open minded or still haven't established themselves intellectually. By that, I mean their reasoning is not fully developed this way or that way. Those are the people that we really had to reach.

So when I did that debate in Kentucky, my audience, from at least my way of thinking, was not really there in the auditorium. It was online. The thing has had millions of views, for crying out loud. And can I go on some more about me and tooting my horn? Doo da da da! My book, which I just sat down and kind of hammered out, is a New York Times bestseller. What I mean is, it just shows you how interested people are in this, here, in the most advanced society-- you can say maybe Japan, or New Zealand, or something-- but in one of the world's most advanced societies, we have people that don't believe in the main idea in biology. It's wild.

IRA FLATOW: But you're an engineer attacking-- writing a book about evolution.

BILL NYE: Well here's what I say about me as an engineer. I took a lot of physics, everybody, and what I describe in this book is a primer on evolution. It's not that I'm a world class evolutionary biologist. These are fundamental ideas that everybody should-- in my view, the world would be better if everybody understood.

IRA FLATOW: You also take a view in your book on genetically engineered food.

BILL NYE: Oh, it's been "con-tra-versal." Yes.

IRA FLATOW: Tell us about that, the "con-tra-versy."

BILL NYE: The "con-tra-versy" has been I assert that, although we can know whatever we do to an organism-- wheat, soybeans, potatoes, especially corn-- you can know with extraordinary precision and confidence the genome, or the sequence of genes, for that organism with extraordinary accuracy. What you can't know is when you take organisms that have speciated-- different species that have come to be over geologic time scales, hundreds of millions of year-- and you mix those-- not really mix those genes, but insert genes from one into the other, you can't know what you're going to do to the ecosystem, to the other organisms that live with those new, novel, genetically modified organisms.

Now, so these things are tested over three or four growing seasons by a manufacturer-- let's say, Monsanto. Let's say Monsanto-- Then they're tested again by the Department of Agriculture. And you can show with great confidence that these foods are safe to eat. I mean, bring it on. Bring on the popcorn. I'm loving it.

But what you can't be sure of is, if you've messed with some insect that is now killed by the corn that has this bacillus-- that has this bacterium's genes put in it, and then that turns out that that insect carries a virus, which kills a parasite, which attacks this other thing, which then affects-- and then, buh, buh, buh. You can't really be sure, especially if you're doing it for only a decade. These things came into existence over hundreds of millions-- so I'm open minded.

And the other thing, which is separate-- I hardly address in the book at all-- is are we-- the claim is that we're going to need enormous amounts of food to feed billions of people in the future, but we waste a lot of food. We throw away a lot of food. So it's not clear that production is the problem you need to solve. So just being able to produce enormous amounts of food-- it's not clear that's really where we should be throwing our tax dollars. So these are controversial, and what I plan to do--

IRA FLATOW: Well, I think-- yes go ahead.

BILL NYE: What I plan to do is go to Omaha, Nebraska and meet with Bill Fraley, who's the chief technology officer at Monsanto. And he's going to give me earful, and if I'm wrong, I will write about it.

IRA FLATOW: But they also make pesticides, right? They make herbicides. And is it better to have all those herbicides?

BILL NYE: It's on and on and on. And these are the great questions. And so bear in mind that intra-species modification-- that is to say, modifying wheat with wheat. People have been doing since there have been people. Bring it on. George Washington was apparently really-- he was a hobbyist. That you can see. I think you can argue you're not going to do anything that's going to mess with an ecosystem in any spectacular way, because they're so close in geologic time.

The problem is when you start getting these things that are a long way apart. They speciated a long time ago-- or the potential problem. So I plan to meet with a guy and hear exactly what he has to say. And if he changes my mind, I will have my mind changed.

IRA FLATOW: All right, well you'll come back and tell us about it.

BILL NYE: A man can dream. A man can dream, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Speaking of dreaming, Ian from Honolulu is on the phone. Hi, welcome to Science Friday.

IAN: Hey, thanks a lot. This is pretty exciting. So I actually-- by way of background, I got to see the debate between Dr. Nye and Ken Ham, and I thought it was a good debate. The way I'm coming at the-- it touches on exactly what you guys were just talking about, which is kind of like the field of bioethics. And where I'm coming at is that I think that the whole debate between religion and science-- can you prove one. Can you prove God doesn't exist? And can people of faith believe in evolution is so passe.

I think what's really critical, given the fact that you guys have emphasized many times about how we live in such a technologically advanced society with tools that we don't even know what we might end up doing with them is that we sort of get beyond that and really find ways for the debate or the discussion to be less about a debate over science versus religion and more about how we apply all of the expanding knowledge that we have to really difficult problems that have a real moral, ethical component, where people of faith and people of faith who happen to also be scientists and participate in the discovery of it can weigh in.

And I'm wondering-- I guess my question is, Dr. Nye believe that there's a way that maybe he and where he's coming from and the folks that he interacts with can do more to sort of direct to the discussion towards that, instead of-- it seems to always end up falling back to the same old debate, and I actually kind of see this fault for that laying on both extreme creationists, both sides--

IRA FLATOW: We'll get--

IAN: --and extreme--

IRA FLATOW: Let me get-- I've got only a limited amount of time to get their answer. I'm talking with Bill Nye, author of Undeniable-- Evolution and the Science of Creation on Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. Mr. Nye. Do you have an answer to that question? How you can all get together and concentrate on the big issues that need to be solved?

BILL NYE: Well, the biggest issue we need to solve-- changing the subject-- is climate change. And there is something consistent about denying evolution and denying climate change. This is a big thing with, for example, Answers in Genesis, where I was doing this debate. As far as it being scientists' fault for being equally at fault for not engaging people in moving us all forward, you're asking a lot.

To have people that depend on our understanding of geology-- you brought up earlier oil fields. I used to work in the oil patch down there in the Permian Basin. You ever been to Snyder? Big Spring?

IRA FLATOW: Been to Flatonia.

BILL NYE: Wow. Anyway, you know what I'm saying? It's a lot to ask of scientists to give credence, or time, or especially this expression, equal time, to these extraordinary world views, which are inconsistent with everything we observe in nature. With that said, I really do, sir-- I do really do do my best to be civil, to respect people as best as I can. And I'm delighted that you watched the debate. That just shows you-- just doing the debate raised the issue that we're talking about it, so that maybe is good.

IRA FLATOW: So maybe you need another debate, any other debate? You had enough of one? Maybe a debate with Monsanto? I don't--

BILL NYE: Well, I mean, maybe the guy will change my mind. I say you can understand the organism, but not the ecosystem, so let us be careful. That's my premise.

IRA FLATOW: Have you got another book in the works?

BILL NYE: Yeah, the next one is about climate change.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah?

BILL NYE: I was just working on it today. And so my thing is all of us-- it's very common to find books on the shelves now, and people on your show, and people on MSNBC, and CNN, and Fox-- where I'd love to be in the den there-- who are on either side of this thing and are wringing their hands about we're all going to die. The world is in horrible shape. And there's something to that.

But I want to present-- is an optimistic view. The things that we can do together to-- dare I say it-- change the world-- now, in my view, we need to do everything all at once. And for those of you who hate government-- or, sorry, are very disturbed by the size of government, do not want government involved, I'll just point out that, if we keep down this road of not doing anything about climate change, of not talking about climate change, we're going to end up with a lot of regulations. There's going to be a backlash. People are going to jump all over this--

IRA FLATOW: But what about the new Congress with this? Now headed by Republicans who are not the leaders in climate change?

BILL NYE: Well, you've got to take the longer view. And we have people-- the guy from South Dakota-- who acknowledges that climate change is a serious problem, and he's a very conservative guy. We have more in common than we have differences. So I want us to move forward. And I believe it's going to take technical solutions.

If you can invent the better battery, better electrical energy storage system-- if you can invent the way to desalinate seawater economically, you will get rich.

[COMICAL MANIACAL LAUGH]

IRA FLATOW: Well, solar energy.

BILL NYE: Solar energy is plentiful. If you can come up with more efficient solar panels, that would be great. But then the other thing I think we're going to need is top down reinvestment by taxing-- sorry, not taxing. Sorry, my bad. Excuse me. I meant having a fee associated with carbon dioxide. And we have a model for this in the state of Alaska, a top down scheme of distributing wealth. We can do it everybody. We can do it.

IRA FLATOW: Bill Nye, author of Undeniable-- Evolution and the Science of Creation. You can also read an excerpt from Bill's book at our website at sciencefriday.com/undeniable. Always a pleasure to have you on, Bill.